Sea of Slaughter (14 page)

As late as 1976, a Canadian government publicity release insisted that polar bears were still “abundant and adequate... Despite international controversy concerning the decline in populations there is a harvestable surplus in Canada.” Nevertheless, the statement continued peevishly, “it has been increasingly difficult for Canadians to export the valuable polar bear hides because of restrictions by other nations”—a reference to embargoes on the import of the skins of endangered species, which many western nations now considered the white bear to be. “Canada's position,” the release concluded, “emphasizes sound management principles rather than a rigid form of protection.”

The head of the Canadian Wildlife Service's Polar Bear Project added his opinion that a ban on the killing of white bears would be “protectionist overreaction.” Adopting such a course, he explained, would make it difficult for scientists to carry on useful research and adequate management, by preventing the collection of biological specimens (read: dead bears). As things stood, he emphasized, Canada was leading the way in determining the future of the polar bear.

The nature of that future was spelled out in another government publication of the same period. Raw polar bear hides, it jubilantly reported, were fetching from $500 to $3,000 each on the international market. Consequently, the annual permissible harvest of 630 Canadian bears, as recommended by management scientists, was worth over a million dollars in pelts alone, plus at least half that much again in fees and services charged to hunters from the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. Good economic sense together with good science dictated that the harvest should continue.

It has continued. Although in 1972 the U.S. banned polar bear killing in Alaska except for subsistence hunting by native people and, a year later, Norway followed the Soviet Union's lead by banning
all
polar bear hunting in its territory, Canada continues “harvesting” the bears, as does Greenland. Since 1973 the commercial killing of white bears has been effectively a monopoly held by these two countries. It is a very lucrative one. In 1984 Canadian quotas will allow the killing of about 700, and Greenland will kill about 300. The Japanese, who now buy up to 95 per cent of these “novelty” furs, will pay as much as $5,000 for an especially good one, and South Koreans will pay up to $3,000 for a dried polar bear gallbladder, which they use for medicinal purposes. Furthermore, sport hunters will each pay an average of $15,000 for the privilege of killing a bear.
2

There is some good news. Ontario, which controls much of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, has established the Polar Bear Wilderness Park on the west side of James Bay, and the resident bears are fully protected there. Manitoba, which is now reaping a good return from tourists travelling to Churchill to see wild white bears, has forbidden the killing of them except by native people. In the Soviet Union, the bear population has increased so dramatically that, in some places such as Wrangell Island, it may be approaching aboriginal levels. The image of the great white bear has become a symbol of enlightened conservation in the Soviet Union where, as elsewhere, those who believe that non-human forms of life deserve the right to exist are frequently at odds with those who believe they were placed on earth to be used or, as it may be, abused by man as he sees fit.

Along the northeastern seaboard of America the white bear is now little more than a fast-fading wraith. Since 1960 perhaps two dozen have come south on the pack ice, but at least fifteen of these have been intercepted by Norwegian sealers off Newfoundland and killed “in self defence.” In the spring of 1962, one that escaped the sealers walked into the outport village of Rose Blanche on Newfoundland's southwest coast. First seen emerging from the village cemetery, its appearance caused such panic that all hands fled for the safety of their houses. The bear paid them no heed. Making its way to the water, it swam off toward the harbour entrance where it encountered two men in a dory. They deflected it with yells and by banging their oars against the gunwales. The bear thereupon changed course toward the opposite shore of the harbour. By dint of frantic rowing, the men reached their fishing store, snatched up their guns, and were in time to shoot it dead as it stood, perplexed, in the landwash, unsure of which way to go.

A more recent visitation took place in eastern Newfoundland on May 9, 1973, when a young bear, already wounded, walked into the outskirts of the village of New Chelsea, near Heart's Content. It threatened no one and no thing but, like all of its kind over the long years, it was met with gunfire.

“Comin' down the road there, he looked like a bloody big ghost!” remembers one of those who saw it die.

Indeed. A great White Ghost.

Once upon a time
there
were three bears. There was a white bear, a brown bear, and a black bear...

We have seen what happened to the white one. Here is what has happened and is happening to the others.

If the one-time presence of the white bear on the Atlantic seaboard has been largely ignored by history, another ursine giant who was the white bear's peer has been totally forgotten. When Europeans began arriving in the New World, an enormous brown bear roamed the continent from Mexico to Alaska; eastward over the whole of the Great Plains to the Mississippi and Manitoba; and across the entire Arctic mainland from Pacific to Atlantic. Since it was absent from the eastern forest regions, it was not encountered by the invaders of the lower continental mainland until they reached the Mississippi country about 1800; but, at least a century earlier, traders into Hudson Bay had met the great creature and named it the “grizzled bear.” It has since borne many names, such as silver-tip, roach-back, and grey bear, but grizzly is the enduring one.

Grizzlies were so named because a mantle of light grey or “grizzled” fur composed of silver-tipped hairs covers their huge, squat heads and massively humped shoulders. Ranking with the white bear as the largest carnivore on the continent, an adult male grizzly may weigh 1,000 pounds and can be a fearsome spectacle as it rears back on its haunches to peer down upon mere man from a height of seven or eight feet.

Usually tolerant of human beings, unless wounded, cornered, or protecting cubs, the big bears were nevertheless treated circumspectly by most aboriginal peoples who, before the coming of firearms, took care to avoid provoking them. However, European settlers regarded all bears as inherently treacherous and dangerous beasts that ought to be killed on sight, and the grizzly seems to have especially inflamed their animosity.

It was remorselessly pursued, shot, trapped, or poisoned by ranchers who accused it of being a sheep and cattle killer. The charge was, and is, grossly exaggerated. When such accusations have been investigated, it has often been shown that the grizzly was simply scavenging the carcass of an animal that had died of natural causes or had been killed by some other predator. However, even had this truth been accepted, the settlers would probably not have altered their attitude. The great bear drew upon itself to a singular degree modern man's malevolent hatred of any other creature that seems capable of challenging our dominion.

Within less than a hundred years of its discovery in the West, the grizzly had been exterminated wherever agriculturalists settled. Today it continues to exist—precariously—mainly in national parks and a few remote wilderness areas. It is one of the most sought-after prizes of trophy hunters—that peculiar breed whose chief pleasure seems to lie in slaughtering large animals in order to hang their stuffed heads on rec-room walls as macabre testimony to machismo.

Another major element in the destruction of the great bears was the killing of enormous numbers for “scientific purposes.” As an example of the atrocities committed in the name of science, the fate of the grizzly can hardly be bettered.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, an American mammalogist, Dr. C. Hart Merriam, was the acknowledged “supreme authority” on North American bears. He earned this eminence by spending a professional lifetime in the employ of the U.S. Biological Survey, collecting and examining the skins and skulls of grizzlies with a view to subdividing them into a complicated system of species and subspecies. In 1918, he published his findings.

“In my Preliminary Synopsis of the American Bears [I recognized] eight grizzlies and big brown bears of which five [were new to science. I did] not suspect that the number remaining to be discovered was anything like so great as has since proved to be the case. The steady influx of specimens resulting from the labors of the Biological Survey, supplemented by the personal efforts of a number of hunter-naturalists, brought to light many surprises... and beginning in the spring of 1910, a fund placed at my disposal made it possible to offer hunters and trappers sufficient enducement to tempt them to exert themselves in securing needed specimens. As a result, the [U.S.] national collection of grizzly bears has steadily grown until... it now far excels all other collections in the world together.

“Nevertheless... knowledge of the big bears is by no means complete... Many bears now roaming the wild will have to be killed and their skulls and skins sent to museums before their characters and variations will be fully understood and before it will be possible to construct accurate maps of their ranges. Persons having the means and ambition to hunt big game may be assured that... much additional material is absolutely required to settle questions [of race and species] still in doubt.”

What the good Dr. Merriam succeeded in doing was to separate the grizzly into a total of seven species and seventy-seven subspecies, to fifty-eight of which his name was attached as the discoverer. Alas for ambition. Modern scientists have invalidated most of his discoveries, and the maps of the grizzly's range, which Merriam felt could only be drawn accurately if a lot more “specimens” were killed, became mere cemetery charts where the bones of the bulk of the grizzly population of North America rot unremarked.

However, more than 9,000 “study specimens” of the grizzly, carefully garnered by science assisted by “hunter-naturalists,” are held in storage in the great museums of America against the day when perhaps another Dr. Merriam will undertake a new revision of the species and subspecies of a vanished animal.

Through several centuries, stories trickled out of the vast Labrador/Ungava wilderness about a creature that, from the descriptions, could hardly have been anything except a grizzly. Added to these were matter-of-fact records from fur traders who bought skins of “grey,” “grisly,” or “grizzly bears” from the Inuit of the coast and the Indians of the interior. However, because none of these skins fell into the hands of scientists or ended up in museum collections, the accumulating evidence that grizzly bears existed in the region was ignored.

In 1954, C.S. Elton, an Oxford-based expert on animal population dynamics, published a paper setting out the evidence that a grizzly not only had inhabited much of Labrador/Ungava but might still exist. Unfortunately, as Elton pointed out, “No white man has ever certainly seen alive the barren-ground grizzly to which the natives refer... [scientists therefore] have mostly shelved the question of its existence and identity.”

The definitive rejection had been made in 1948 by Dr. R.M. Anderson, chief mammalogist to Canada's National Museum. “Admittedly,” said Anderson, “some kind of Grizzly or ‘big Brown Bear' is legendary in northern Quebec or Ungava, but no... specimen... has ever been examined, and so I shall not have much confidence [in its existence] until a skin with skull, and feet with claws, has been produced, and the specimen should have a pedigree or abstract of title to show where it came from.”

In 1974, Anderson's sarcastic dictate was still being defended by a successor to his post, Dr. A.W.F. Banfield, who gave it as his considered opinion that no race of grizzly bear had been native to Labrador/Ungava in historic times. “Hearsay accounts of grizzlies,” he opined, in an oblique reference to Elton, “have misled scientists more often than not, perhaps more in the case of the rumoured presence of the bears in the Ungava peninsula of Northern Quebec and Labrador.” Here is a synopsis of the evidence Anderson and Banfield so cavalierly rejected.

Although nothing exists in print to tell us what early Europeans knew about the great brown bear, the Descelier World Map, dating to about 1550, shows two well-drawn bears on the shore-ice off Labrador, accompanied by the legend
ours sur les glaces.
Both bears are of equal size, but one is white and the other brown. A third bear, also brown, is depicted standing on the Labrador land mass. Barren ground grizzlies in the central Arctic are known to frequent sea ice where, although white bears are quite at home, black bears seldom if ever venture.

One of the first English settlers in Labrador, Captain George Cartwright, recorded the presence there of a species of bear different from the white and black bears. Cartwright never penetrated into the interior and so did not see the strange bear himself, but on the basis of what his interpreter could gather from the natives, he described it as “a kind of bear very ferocious, having a white ring around its neck.” This agrees with accounts offered by present-day Indians of the region when referring to the Great Bear of the Montagnais and the
Mehtashuee
of the Nascopie—both of which were very large brown bears that were fierce and dangerous if aroused. Cartwright's white ring about the neck is probably a half-understood reference to the grizzly's silvery-grey mantle.

References to the big bears became more numerous and more specific in the nineteenth century. The Hudson's Bay Company was then operating trading posts on the Ungava Coasts and occasionally in the interior as well, while Moravian missions had posts along the Atlantic coast of Labrador. One of the early HBC factors, John Maclean, spent six years trading at Fort Chimo near the bottom of Ungava Bay after four years serving the Company in what is now British Columbia, where he had become familiar with the western grizzly. In a report on the Ungava District for 1837–38, he lists black, grissle, and Arctic (viz. white) bears as being among the local fur resources. In a book about his trading experiences in Ungava, he added that “The black bear shuns the presence of man and is by no means a dangerous animal; the grisly bear, on the contrary, commands considerable respect from the ‘lord of creation'... When we consider the great extent of country that intervenes between Ungava and the ‘far west' it seems inexplicable that the grisly bear should be found in so insulated a situation... the fact of their being here, however, does not admit of a doubt, for I have traded and sent to England several of their skins.”

HBC fur returns for Ungava District for the seasons 1838–39 and 1839–40 still survive. In 1838, one black bear skin was traded and, in the following year, one black and four “grey bears”—grey bear being the HBC trade term for grizzly. Reports by other HBC employees substantiate Maclean's observations. Captain William Kennedy, who served in Ungava District during the 1860s, stated that many bear skins were received at Fort Chimo, Fort Nascopie, and the George River post and sold in the trade as a variety of the (western) grizzly. And a Mr. Mittleberger, a retired HBC factor living in the U. S., is quoted in 1884 to the effect that the grizzly was still found in Labrador in his time, which seems to have been the 1870s.

The trading records of the six Moravian missions strung along 300 miles of the Labrador coast, from Makkovik in the south to Nachvak in the north, show that the Moravians had regularly traded for skins of “grey” or “grizzly” bears through more than a century, buying the last one in 1914.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, interior Labrador and Ungava began attracting scientific travellers. One of these, the ethnologist L.M. Turner, was at Fort Chimo from 1882 to 1884. Turner had no doubts about the existence of the grizzly in that region. “The brown or barren-ground bear appears to be [now] restricted to a narrow area and is not plentiful, yet it is common enough to keep the Indian in wholesome dread of its vicious disposition when enraged.”

That the bears had indeed become rare by that time was confirmed by A.P. Lowe, a government geologist who made extensive explorations of north-central Labrador and Ungava between 1892 and 1895. He reported that “specimens of the barren-ground bear are [now] obtained only at infrequent intervals... [but] there is no doubt that this species is found in the barrens of Labrador... skins are brought at intervals to Fort Chimo when the Indians have a favourable chance to kill it. On other occasions they leave it alone, having a great respect for, and fear of its ferocity and size.”

By 1894, there were probably few left alive. The Hudson's Bay Company seems not to have traded any skins after that year, and the Moravians only one. But around 1900, an independent trader named Martin Hunter, who had a post on Anticosti Island, bought some large brown bear pelts. According to Hunter, the animals that produced these skins were of “immense size and very savage. One skin I got measured seven feet broad by nine feet long and showed no fewer than eleven bullet holes in his hide.” These skins may have come from southern Labrador. Newfoundland writer and naturalist Harold Horwood tells me that “Labrador natives, both white and Indian, state positively that the [grizzly] bears were once found as far to the south and east as the Mealy Mountains, a barren, broken range between Goose Bay and Cartwright.”

Dillon Wallace, an American traveller who spent part of the winter of 1905–06 at Fort Chimo before making his way overland to Hamilton Inlet, reported “a very large and ferocious brown bear that tradition says inhabits the barrens to the eastward of George River. Mr. Peter McKenzie told me that, many years ago, when he was stationed at Fort Chimo, the Indians brought him one of the skins of the animal, and Ford, [the trader] at George River [Post] said that, some twenty years since, he saw a piece of one of the skins. Both agreed that the hair was very long, light brown in colour, silver tipped and of a very different species from either the polar or black bear... The Indians speak of it with dread, and insist that it is still to be found though none of them can say positively that he has seen one in a decade.”

Elton believes that, after 1900, a remnant of the original population lingered on in the almost impenetrable triangle of mountain tundra lying west of the Torngat range in northern Labrador. This region could well have been the provenance of the bear that yielded up its skin to the Moravians during the winter of 1913–14. The skin was traded by Inuit who hunted caribou in the tundra triangle.